The last trading day of April saw the CBOT open lower and it looked like it would continue the week’s apparent theme of lower trade. Bears’ hopes were quickly dashed, however, as the market rallied starting mid-day and ended sharply higher. July corn settled limit-up and soybeans posted a 32-cent gain for the day. Even wheat, lacking much bullish news for itself, followed higher. The afternoon strength created some mild short covering with weak shorts increasingly nervous heading into a weekend of dry weather for Brazil. Funds were net buyers as they often try to improve their position heading into the month’s end. Funds are thought to have bought 20,000 corn contracts, 3,000 wheat contracts, and 10,000 contracts of soybea...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.